It was a beautiful day in August, the kind of mountain day that makes you want to live to be a hundred, despite accumulating evidence in your muscles and bones that human bodies are not designed to be old mountain climbers. We'd driven 200 gallons of diesel fuel up a goat track of a road, to meet a helicopter that would fly it to our ridge-top crystal mine: Spruce.
The chopper was late, which would normally be of no consequence, but this day was also the start of filming a t.v show for the Travel Channel. Cascade Crystals episode, Kirsten Gum: Adventurer…
I've spent a lot of time in helicopters, as has Kirsten, and the Spruce landing scared us both. Our exit from the heli was even more exciting than it appeared on the show. The cabin was shaking violently, we weren't sure that the pilot really had the craft under control, as the skids only touched the ground occasionally, and the pilot kept yelling f**k, f**k ... not terribly professional. I grabbed my pack, tossed Kirsten hers, and jumped out, foot touching a moving skid as I went. Took 3 long steps to clear the rotor, crouched over M*A*S*H-style, and dove into a small gully between a stump and a root. Kirsten followed my footsteps, but tripped on the root, so just as I was sitting up, she flattened me onto the rocks in the gully. I had imagined it would be more fun to roll around on the ground with that cute redhead! We untangled ourselves, sat up and gave the pilot the 'thumbs up', which is the part they showed. Meanwhile, Scott, a cameraman, had to get aboard to shoot the ‘landing’ footage, shown in reverse.
The Spruce episode was my second interaction with Kirsten and Co. She is just as much fun off camera as she is on camera; with a zest for living life large, is athletic and willing to try anything, and has a great sense of humor. They had filmed at our Rock Candy Mountain property in B.C. the previous summer (2007). That show had turned out so well, and the exposure on the Travel Channel brought us lots of new business, so doing a show at Spruce seemed a no-brainer. Wrong!
There were a few logistical snafus from the get-go. Despite having our GPS coordinates, the pilot got lost on his way to Spruce, so the heli arrived with less fuel than would be necessary to lift all the people and camera gear up the mountain. Archer, my partner, hiked the crew to the site, which took a couple hours, carrying the heavy camera gear. As they hiked, the air temperature climbed, reducing the carrying capacity of the heli. By the time Kirsten & I flew, the engine was redlined just by coming to a hover, not a good condition for landing on an unfamiliar pad.
At Rock Candy, Kirsten had asked to rappel over a cliff. I couldn’t let her do that, as my insurance for RC does not include the use of ropes. I told Indigo Films (production company for the show) that we could include a rappel segment at Spruce if Kirsten brought a harness. She brought three(!) … apparently every show on which she had done any climbing had provided a harness. I got her roped up with an ATC, the cameras were set up below, and we did an easy rappel to our amethyst-producing bench. Made a scenic entry to the locality, but it was edited to look like one more dangerous feature of collecting at Spruce. Hardly. The two cameramen didn’t need to rappel to set up for their shots … the amethyst bench was wide enough to set up tripods and walk comfortably around them. One amusing moment was when Kirsten started her rappel. She shouted “Belay on”, then quickly corrected that to “On belay” … but her rope was anchored to the cliff, as was mine, neither of us was being belayed! I can imagine all the grinning climbers who will watch this segment.
In their blogs on the Travel Channel Wiki Stacey, the producer, and Luke, a cameraman, both commented on the danger at Spruce. They did drop an SLR, which rolled over the cliff and into the canyon, where it met its demise. The camera body was dented, the lens shattered, even the SD card was bent. Our guests at Spruce are required to be attached to ropes, or behind fences, so we are not bent or shattered. We’ve worked Spruce for 30 years without an injury to our visitors, but stats like that don’t make for good tv.
Several viewers have commented that it was odd that Kirsten ‘just happened’ to have a bikini with her when our departure was delayed behind an inoperative Forest Service gate. The original script called for us to visit Goldmyer hotsprings on our way back to town after the 2nd day of shooting, but the delay caused by the helicopter problems shortened their time on the mountain. Stacey’s call was to eliminate the hotspring shoot. If you have to be stuck overnight on a forest road in the middle of nowhere without camping gear, it is nice to have a hotspring to go to! We had a delightful midnite dip in Goldmyer’s ‘cave’ … an underground chamber of hot water … which is one reason Kirsten looked so bedraggled in the shot in her tent. Another reason is that we had all worked at least 14 hours that day!
The other oddity caught by crystal cognoscenti was the flash of cubic pyrite specimens from Logorno, Spain at the start of each segment, and every time Kirsten mentioned that she wanted to find cubes. Spruce produces both cubes and pyritohedrons, depending on what zone we are collecting that year. Our cubes look nothing like Spanish pyrite cubes, which occur frozen in talc. Ours are frozen in, or perched on, crystalline quartz.
“Was it worth it, Kirsten?” Her answer to Agate Designs shop owner Terry Kulberg in Seattle, where the crystal plate she collected was appraised, was “I’ll have to think about that!” No one asked me that question, but … taking two days of my 60 day mining season, providing a helicopter and the logistics for a crew of 8 to live at our mountain-top mining camp, plus the usual innumerable headaches of working with TV … had the show been a standout recommendation of Spruce, would have definitely been worth it. As is, showing my locality in its most dangerous light, I think not. Still, there has been talk of filming Kirsten and co. on one of my adventure crystal-collecting trips to the Kalahari of S. Africa. Will I do it? Stay tuned…
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